Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

70 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Forum Fragment
An occasional feature, highlighting an extract from the
GASi Forum
Response to the poem ‘Bombs’ by Elizabeta Marcos (see
page 74 of this issue).
Dear Elizabeta,
Reading about your painful raw experience of the vicious and criminal
NATO bombings of Serbia has caused all sorts of mixed memories
related to bombs and bombings to tumble into my head, over the past
day or two, some of which I'd like to bring here.
As you know, I grew up in a Birmingham council house
which had a garden, a small green space with a few trees and some
grass. In the garden, next to an apple tree, there was a shed made of
corrugated iron. Many of the surrounding gardens also had the same
shed. At some point I learnt that this shed was in fact a bomb shelter
(An Anderson shelter) from the second world war. We stored coal and
all manner of junk in the shed, so it was virtually impossible to enter,
however, I would spend hours on top imagining if and how and
whether the shed had ever been used for the purpose for which it was
built. I learned later that 2 million of such sheds were issued or sold
during the war...they were given free to those who could not afford to
pay for them ('means-tested' bomb shelters!!!). I didn't have to go far
to know that the area had in fact been bombed during the war. The
park near to where we lived had two huge bomb-craters from the war
- known locally as the 'bomb holes', they were fantastic places to play
and we would spend hours down inside, fighting wars of our own and
risking our lives on our bikes and scooters. The nearby Castle
Bromwich Spitfire aircraft factory would have been the local target.
Heavily industrialised Birmingham had been an obvious target. A few
years ago, I went back to the park and discovered the bomb-holes had
been filled-in.
Some time ago in the 90s, I watched a movie (can't remember
which) set in Ireland during the second world war in which at one
point a huge number of Luftwaffe bombers were seen supposedly
heading for Belfast to do what bombers do. Having grown up
in Birmingham I was more than aware of the 'Blitz' in London and that
places like Liverpool and Coventry had also been badly hit...but
Belfast?....the place where my mother was from? I'd no idea. So I